As the most researched form of psychotherapy, cognitive-behavior therapy is the gold standard psychological treatment.
Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapeutic treatment in which a therapist helps people identify the thoughts and thought patterns that lead to emotional distress. The basic premise of CBT states that our inner beliefs and the way we perceive situations gives rise to automatic thoughts, and using therapeutic strategies to change negative thought patterns leads to a change in problematic feelings and behaviors.
Automatic negative thoughts can create a distortion of reality perception as your brain searches for patterns to make sense of these thoughts. For example, someone that thinks “I am bad at everything I do,” may use any simple mistake they make as evidence to confirm that negative thought.
CBT has been proven to help alleviate symptoms of multiple disorders including, but not limited to:
– Depression
– Anxiety
– Addiction
– Eating Disorders
– General Stress
A licensed therapist can help you by using exercises to identify the unhelpful thought patterns that maintain symptoms and replace them with thoughts that better serve you. Working together, you can create an action plan to overcome any situations or problems you may face. This action plan can include strategies to identify problematic thoughts or behaviors, how to work on changing them and implementing this change through practice.
Common exercises using CBT include:
– Unraveling cognitive distortions
– Cognitive restructuring
– Meditation and relaxation breathing
Therapists help people set and reach short-term goals in order to change behaviors and unlearn negative reactions. Research shows that the skills learned with CBT last long after the treatment ends.
How can CBT help?
By working with a therapist, people using CBT learn valuable coping skills to handle their issues. These valuable skills allow them to identify negative thoughts or behaviors and restructure them to objective and realistic thoughts, which can lead to a reduction in symptoms caused by mental disorders.
There is a large body of research that backs up CBT and it has been shown to be especially effective for treating anxiety disorders. CBT has also been associated with improvements in quality of life in anxiety patients.
The goal of cognitive-behavior therapy is to leave people with tools that they can use throughout their life. These tools include the understanding that although they can not control everything that happens in their life, they can work on controlling how they interpret and deal with things in their environment.
Different ways CBT can help include:
– Gaining an understanding of your internal thoughts
– Learning how to problem solve
– Learning how to better manage life’s difficulties
– Learning how to approach fear inducing situations
– Overall improvement of self esteem
With cognitive-behavior therapy, the emphasis is on the relationship between cognition (i.e. your thoughts) and behavior (i.e. your actions). Going hand in hand, this relationship has a massive impact on the way you interpret the world and react to situations that arise.
Using CBT with help from a therapist, you can learn to change the way you think. This in turn changes the way you feel, which has an impact on your behavior. Being aware of the way your thoughts influence your behavior allows you to move in sync with your mind, rather than working against it.
